Afraid New World

 There was no room for emergency

in the emergency room

so she settled into her car

as life emerged from her,

and then life left

her infant, too.

What were the doctors supposed to do?

If you said first, no harm

then no harm done,

but that math isn't fooling

anyone. It's attention diverted

from the harm of inaction

when fear has gained traction

and pro-life is merely

forced birth,

and such births will happen anyhow

and that the baby died doesn't matter

to the screamers now-

having happened in a car

not a clinic.

Call me a cynic, but if you call this 

an act of God, or

an act of fate,

I would say no--it was the state

that barred the door

that tied the hands

that choked the heart

that buried the child, 

all mummified in red tape. 

Tape as red as blood. 

The Ghosts of Fallen Women

My head is always beset
with the visions of fallen women
bloody in hotel rooms,
murdered at home,
lying in ditches,
traduced and betrayed,
in Magdalene Laundries,
on coroner's gurneys,
throwing themselves downstairs,
taking pennyroyal oil
and bleeding,
bleeding,
dying for days.

These living women
haunt my conscience,
these girls who shrieked
their labor songs in chains,
or were jailed for dropping
their gifts like stones,
who threaded the path between
their addictions
and the health of two,

who took beatings knowing they
did not
take those beatings alone.

My mind is haunted
with the knowledge of gifted women
happy in motherhood
blessed with strength
privileged in many ways--
and they remind me also
of these so many ways
the freedom to bear
means everything.

And that the freedom to choose
one's life, and
the freedom over one's body,
and the triumph
of the once-"fallen"
is the only redemption I give a damn about.
For the sake of the dead and gone,
for the sake of the here and now,
and for the sake of those
to be.

Only choices
let my
women be free.

The Scar

Between each hip
the scar runs
crosswise
beneath the navel,
an abdomen bisected
by the blade
to take out
so many pounds of flesh;
as once flesh itself
cut her
below the navel,
her life
bisected
to idly insert
new life within.

Those who never saw
nature's bloody claw
will never see that scar,
for the modesty we give
children
will leave it, for them,
veiled in a mystery.
But those who know
that bite and scratch living
and the pain that throbs in
the vital thrust

that drives the arteries and
the veins and muscular torsion
of all our mammal descent into
life know
this reminder will always stay.
This is the nature of such scars.
One beneath the navel
to go with the half-remembered
cut between the legs.
The incision where
a decision was made
for her
because her body
was too small to protest
and too small to comply.

This reminder will always be
a line to the first
brutal time, and every
brutal time confronted
with the link
her body helplessly
formed in a fear made flesh
and brought into this world
with the violence
doubled.

A connection to that man.
To his rights.
A gift to him
of fatherhood
unwillingly given
from her who was
called his
sometime child?

And as for well-wishes
and congratulations?
I wish those who made this happen
also wear a scar
being far more culpable for all
that transpired,
dear child,
than you are.

These children,
mother and child--
neither to be shamed
but in no argument
where "consequence"
is spoken of
can it be separated from
the moral frame.
That she "must" suffer
the curse of Eve--
her child,
(although one hopes not)
a mark of Cain.

I could wish you both a better world than this--
this one is always less than safe,
and has a logic worse than sane.

Her Body: Graveyard

The first time at twenty-five
I felt the child inside me alive
until the cramp and blood--
the violent ending,
of my unsung son.

And the second time,
she barely registered--
a missed period, a test,
and I guessed,
maybe yes--this time
I'd fight my biology.
But I fought nausea
and in tears knew
how quickly
she
ceased to be.

My hard-fought fertility
has taken me from
the bed to the ER
to doctors and the spare
couch where I have sat,
paging through unaffordable options,
to have
just one, adorable child.

So tell me,
when this one dies,
if it dies, under my heart,
when do I start to heal--

with a surgical finish
and a promise that we will meet again?
Or will some
jumped up motherfucker
make me leave his little
bones
joined in me until the
rush of
thankless labor
some days off
let me unburden the ghost
of another child I did not have?

Make my heart a
stone,
and inscribe there
their names unwritten
for what your laws will make
of my potters' womb.

A monument to death in me.
My life a tomb
for your
purity.


After this.